The importance of Galatz as a seaport is, however, quite another matter.  Although this country transacts a very considerable trade with it, there are very few English houses or agencies there, the chief business being carried on by German, Italian, Greek, and French firms; and not only those languages, but also Turkish and Bulgarian, are requisite for trading purposes.

The chief commodities exported to England are, as already stated, maize and barley, and the chief importations from this country are cotton yarn, cottons, woollens, machinery, hardware, cutlery, dry stuffs, spices, tea and sugar, but besides those there is hardly an article used by a civilised community which is not supplied to Roumania from this country.  In two admirable reports published in 1877 and 1878, our Consul-General in Roumania, Mr. Percy Sanderson, has reviewed the trade between the two nations, and he gives some rather significant hints to ‘fair traders,’ that is to say not in the refined sense in which the term has been recently employed, but in its good old-fashioned signification of honest dealers.  ‘It cannot be said,’ he remarks, ’that the bulk of the goods imported from Great Britain forms by any means a fair sample of its produce and manufactures,’ and ’there is already a tendency amongst the well-to-do classes to purchase French or Austrian manufactures when they are prepared to pay a high price for a really good article, although the same goods might possibly be furnished them from Great Britain at a lower rate.’[48] But Consul Sanderson gives another reason for the preference shown for foreign as distinguished from English manufactures.  It is that the local trade is chiefly carried on by natives of those countries from which the articles preferred are imported, ’whilst there is not a single shop in Galatz kept by an Englishman—­it seems doubtful whether there be one in the whole of Roumania.’  And there is still a third reason, to which he only refers incidentally, but we question whether it is not the most cogent of all.  Whilst continental states, and especially Austria, have shown little delicacy in exacting favourable treaties of commerce from the Roumanian Government, England has been at a disadvantage in that respect.  We may be told that we are placed on the most favoured nation footing, but we were informed at Bucarest by persons occupying high positions, and whose statements may be trusted implicitly, that, although this is apparently and nominally the case, it is not so in reality, as the commercial treaties have been initiated by Austria, and so framed as to give a preference to her manufactures.[49]

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, however, our exports to Roumania are on the whole increasing, as witness the following statistics (Board of Trade, 1881), although there has been a slight falling off in cotton stuffs on which the tariff is high, and in manufactured iron.

Total Exports from Great Britain to Roumania.